[aspell-devel] GNU Aspell 0.60-pre1 Now Available

From:

Kevin Atkinson

Subject:

[aspell-devel] GNU Aspell 0.60-pre1 Now Available

Date:

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 22:56:58 -0400 (EDT)

The first official pre-release of GNU Aspell 0.60 is now available at:
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/aspell-0.60-pre1.tar.gz
You will also need to download at least one dictionary. Dictionaries
designed specifically for version 0.60 can be found at
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict
However, dictionaries packages for Aspell 0.50 can generally also be used
so if you don't find the one you are looking for there also try
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict
As always more info on Aspell itself can be found at http://aspell.net
Changes from 0.50.5 to 0.60:
* Added support for Affix Compression. Affix compression stores the
root word and then a list of prefixes and suffixes that the word
can take, and thus saves a lot of space. The codebase comes from
MySpell found in OpenOffice. It uses the same affix file that
OpenOffice (and Mozilla) use.
* Added support for accepting all input and printing all output in
UTF-8 or some other encoding different from the one Aspell uses.
This includes support for Unicode normalization. Aspell can now
support any language with no more than 210 distinct characters,
including different capitalizations and accents, _even if_ there
is not an existing 8-bit encoding that supports the language.
* Added support for loadable filters and customizable filter modes
thanks to Christoph Hintermüller.
* Enhanced SGML filter to also support skipping sgml tags such as
"script" blocks thanks to Tom Snyder.
* Added gettext support thanks to Sergey Poznyakoff
* Reworked the compiled dictionary format. Compiled dictionaries
now take up less space (less than 80% for the English language) and
creating them is significantly faster (over 4 times for the
English language).
* Reworked suggestion code. It is significantly faster when dealing
with short words (up to 10 times). Also added support for MySpell
Replacement Tables and n-gram lookup. In addition, added basic
support for compound words.
* Manual has has been converted to texinfo format thanks to the work
of Chris Martin.
* Reworked the build system so that a single Makefile is used for
most of the code.
* Lots of other minor changes due to another massive overhaul of the
source code.
I plan on creating another pre-release in about two weeks, or, if they're
not any major problems, an official release.
Please test this out throughly. I am particularly interested in if it works
OK with other applications that use Aspell as a library such as PHP. It
should be binary compatible with Aspell 0.50, but this has not been very
well tested.
If you are a translator please work on updating the Aspell translation
in time for the official release of Aspell 0.60. The strings should be
stable now.
If you are reasonable for packaging Aspell please work on creating a
binary package for Aspell 0.60 and let me know if you run into problems.
Aspell 0.60 should be stable enough now so that it can replace Aspell
0.50.
This pre-release contains a number of portability fixed when compared to
the 20040703 snapshot as well as a few minor bug fixes.
--
http://kevin.atkinson.dhs.org